The second edition of VIE Contemporary Drama Festival seems set to build on the reputation it acquired for risk-taking during its debut edition. In the wake of last year’s success, the Festival is poised once again to defy limits, throw off labels and definitions, venture into unknown territory. Unshakeable in its conviction that drama can survive without a theatre and without words, VIE’s mission is to flush out new languages, direct, honest and at times merciless, able to tell the “inside story” the way it is. VIE maps contemporary international and national theatre by training the spotlight on new, unseen forms of drama and their leading players, placing centre-stage ideas that feed on doubt, conflict and intense emotion.Last year’s festival brought together a number of events whose common denominator was unforeseen and ungovernable conflict. This year, fear and terror stalk the stage: the festival explores the thing we fear most about terrorism – the absence of place and precisely defined forms. Drama steeped in vulnerability, from which it draws its vital juices, finds a fitting accomplice in music, a powerful unifying force – direct in its appeal and resistant to repetition. VIE is a young festival designed by and for people unafraid of prying into the gaps and cracks, foolhardy enough to lean over the railings and risk plunging headlong over precipice.